Sammy Walnuts and the Squirrel Mafia

I mentioned on Facebook the other day that I am in the middle of a remodel project and I am currently gutting the main stairs, entrance, and upstairs landing & hallway. Now I live in an old house and we have squirrels travelling in the walls all the time - especially the winter.

So it is not unusual to find walnuts and the occasional corpse in the wall when tearing them out. Well many a year ago a false ceiling was put in over the main stairs and it became the main hangout for our furry friends, so I totally expected to find the above. I got two bodies and about 500 nuts (sounds like the beginnings of a good joke yeah?).

What I didn't expect was to wake up the next morning and find this dumped on the pile of rubble.

I guess the little Scarfaces noticed I was doing a good clean up and dumped the body during the night so I could get rid of it for them. I feel like I am in Goodfellas helping to hide the evidence.

Here is some more work in progress shots. This is the drop ceiling:

This is the break in the plaster underneath the drop ceiling where the squirrels were getting in.

Project 2009

Home Improvement Project 2009 has begun.

Front Entry Way

Front Stairs

Upstairs Hall

Back Stairs

I will post pictures soon, but we are gutting to the studs. For the hall we are pulling out the floors to the joists. While the wood floor looks nice, the slant something awful to one side. Something is not right underneath.

The drop ceiling in the front stairs is where the squirrels live in the winter. I am expecting about 500,000 nuts to be in there.

It was a good deal

We decided to use odd lot carpet tiles to do Gunnar's room. We got them off of Eric, and all I had to do was commit Gunnar to de-poop their yard after the winter; when the snow melts. How much poop could one little Great Dane produce over the winter? Anyways they had a whole group of red and gray striped ones that we were able to fashion into two large A's.
Now you might be assuming it is an Alcoholic Annonymous reference, or even referring to our High School, Awesome Austin - but you would be wrong. It is in honor of Gunnar's favorite member of the boy band O-Town - the adorable Ashley Angel.

Remodel Going Strong

So we got the room painted, the electricity hooked up and fixtures installed, the finish carpentry cut, painted, & installed, the carpet tiles, and today I got the Ikea closets done. Plus a door handle. I have to make the attic storage door, put the air conditioning pipes back in, and make his elevated bed/desk. Then I am done. Easy.

Window newly framed

The right half of the Ikea Unit

The access to the attic space

And since Gunnar is tall we put the light switch near the ceiling. Actually the lights are on 3 way switches and this will be right next to the elevated bed. This way he can turn his lights off and on while in bed. Without the bed it looks a little strange.

I AM THE KING!

5 Outlets
5 Fixtures

4 Three Way Switches 1 Circuit I am skilled enough at electrical (in my own mind) that I run the wires and finish the drywall before I hook up the power, basically like someone who knows what they are doing. The risk is if you screwed up somewhere you might have to ruin your drywall to fix it. So I hooked up all the power on Monday and when I turned it on the circuit breaker automatically tripped. I thought I might have messed up the three ways (a 3-way switch is where two switches control one light - most people have them at the top and bottom of their stairs) because I had four of them and they are a bit tricky. I spent a few hours diagramming it out and concluded I got it right. I took today off work to run through everything, check each of my hook-ups, and install a new circuit breaker. First power-up and everything worked like a charm. Whatever the problem, I fixed it with my 4 hour run through the entire circuit. Secretly I am so relieved, because tearing out drywall would have totally SUCKED.

Remodel Update

I hate mudding because I am not that good at it. Plus life with five kids gets busy. Anyways we painted the room today - 3 gallons of primer and 2 gallons of paint - for 4 coats overall. That was about $100 in paint then I spent a further $250 at Home Depot getting all my finish carpentry supplies - base boards, door & window trim, and further bits and pieces. I plan to get it all primed and painted on Monday and then to have it all installed by Thanksgiving. My skill level at trim work is passable, but nothing to brag about. Once I get the mudding done the work goes fast and furious. Here is the four corners of the room and the trim supplies:

Remodel Bonanza Part 2

The next step was to insulate the walls and ceiling. We are insulating everything to help with soundproofing between rooms as well as regular reasons. It really starts the transition process to make a room look like a room.


For now we are only doing the walls that are outside or we have already done the other side on a previous remodel. That way if we do a tear out we do not ruin the new insulation.
I went out and bought my 20 sheets of drywall and carried them all up the stairs. A sheet of drywall is approximately 70 pounds. I was dead by the time I got to the 20th sheet. Thursday at 6:30pm is the EQ work party to put the 6 sheets up on the ceiling.

Remodel Bonanza Part 1

Finished the electrical installation on the room. Six outlets, 5 lights, 4 three way switches, and one hard wired smoke detector.

Of course all Lisa could talk about is the whole I drilled by mistake through the exterior of the house. Some people are just negative.
You can see on the bottom right where the whole should have been. Missed by a few inches.

Latest Discovery

Found in the crawl space.
What a resourceful young man Randy turned out to be.

Remodel Update

We slowed down a bit with end of school year activities. And speaking of that - isn't it just crazy?!?!? They don't mention that in the "You want to have 5 kids" handbook they gave us. Every single day it is one activity or concert after another. Anyways, the main gutting is done and I am on schedule today to reframe the doorways (for crawl space entry and the main door). Here are some shots (mainly for those of you who are familiar).

Looking into the room - old crawl space entry at right.

Looking out the doorway to the hall. New door will be 36"'s and will have to be reset about 6"s to fit.

This is where the old closet was.

This is looking in from the hallway into the room.

If you click on that last picture and see the color of the hall on the left, and the wallpaper style on the right; it will be self-explanatory on why we are gutting this house room by room. Not that I blame the in-laws, because if you see the condition of the plaster under it I think stripping off the 100 years of paper and paint on the walls would have caused them to fall down anyways.

The Indiana Jones part of Remodeling

It seems people were always putting little things on top of the ceiling lathe prior to it being sealed up. If your house is old enough you can occasionally find some really neat things up there. Now I did find some tree rat tunnels full of their nuts, if you know what I mean. But other than that I did have two nice finds . First we have the 1916 catalog of new records being offered by Victor. The average record cost in 1916 was 75 cents to $1.25. Of minor interest was the photographs of some of the artists within the front cover. My camera cannot focus on the names, but in the bottom right is Efrem Zimbalist. In the top right is his wife Alma Gluck. Now they went on to produce Efrem Zimbalist Jr. the actor. He of course went on to bring us Laura Holt, the real brains behind Remington Steele.
I also found a magnifying glass. I remember we had one of these at my house as a kid. So interesting but not very rare.

Remodeling - The Dirty Part

Last Friday we tore down the lathe portion of our walls. That is actually pretty easy. Unfortunately many years ago in our house they had insulation blown in the walls and ceilings. So when you pull down the ceiling all the dust and insulation comes with it. Anyways, here is a before shot of the door and closet...
And here is the after. As you can see we removed the entire closet structure and reclaimed several feet of the hallway. The latter had a drop ceiling which contained the duct work for the air conditioning. We are going with a more industrial look for the room so the exposed duct system will actually help us.
Even with the great help from Shawn, Steve, and Eric; it still took about 4 hours and 19 full trash can loads to get all the insulation out. Here is a shot of me before:
And here is after. Even with the nice dust mask (i.e. not the cheap ones) I was still blowing black snot for the rest of the day. Nice image.

Deplastering

Her are some photo's after we removed the plaster, approximately 2500#'s of it.

Window area again.
Old covered up doorway that went to the attic stairs,

Looking from outside the room through the old hallway linen closet into the built-in closet. We will be eliminating the linen closet and bringing the bedroom door flush with the hallway.

Remodel

We began working on what will be Gunnar's room. At least it will be the oldest boy's room so they can be by them self while the others live together in the attic rooms. This is the room that JT has been in and before that it was Amanda's room while she was at home. I took some pictures somewhat at the beginning of the process. I am removing all the wood trim (i.e. doors, window frames, baseboards, etc). I filled the back of my pick-up twice hauling it all.
Looking in from door at opposite corner.
The built in closet next to the door.
The door and closet.